“The Old Man in the Piazza”
by Salman Rushdie
from the November 23, 2020 issue of The New Yorker
I haven’t liked much of Rushdie’s work lately, but “The Old Man in the Piazza” struck me just right.
Every day, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, when the sun’s heat has begun to diminish, the old man comes into the piazza. He walks slowly, shuffling his feet, which are encased in dusty brown loafers. He is wearing, most days, a dark-blue jacket buttoned all the way up to the neck, and navy pants that fasten with a drawstring at the waist. His hair is white, and there is a beret on his head. He goes to the only café in the piazza, the Café of the Fountain, and sits on a wooden chair at a wooden table and orders a small, strong coffee. At 6 p.m., he orders a beer and a sandwich. At 8 p.m., he rises, wipes his lips, and shuffles away, presumably to his home. We do not need to know where he lives. Everything of any significance in his life has happened and will happen right here, in this little piazza.
Not a lot happens in that opening paragraph, and that’s just about the most exciting thing for me to contemplate right now: just observing a piazza and heading home after some food and drink.
Unfortunately for me, the story does not stay in this more pleasant frame. Rushdie is once again the fabulist, telling a story about how language, which he personifies as a woman, is weakened and revolts during a time when the people in the piazza refuse to speak negatively about anything. This harms language, you see? But, a few paragraphs in, language rebels and the time of the “yes” ends.
Five years passed. In the end it was our language herself who rebelled against the “yes.” She got up from the corner of the piazza where she had been meditating silently for half a decade and let out a long, piercing shrief that drove into our ears like a stiletto. It travelled everywhere, as fast as lightning travels. It contained no words. However, no sooner had it been uttered than all our words were unleashed. Words simply burst out of people and would not be held back. People felt great globs of vocabulary rising up in their throats and pushing against their teeth. The more cautious among us pressed our lips tightly together to stop the words from getting out, but the word-torrents forced our lips apart and out they came, like children released from single-sex boarding schools at the end of a long, dour semester. The words tumbled pell-mell into the piazza like girls and boys in search of happy reunions. It was a sight to see.
A new age begins: the age of argumentation.
I lost interest at this time in the fable. I’m curious if anyone else felt similar or if I was just being grumpy because I wanted a story about a man pleasantly sitting in a piazza.
What did you all think?
Ho hum. Another didactic piece posing as a short story.
I NEVER put a New Yorker story down even if I don’t like it but this was unbelievably heavy-handed and pedestrian. Once the central metaphor became clear, I started to groan. I would love to see if other contributors here could toss their two cents in.
Maybe if you knew Hindi it would resonate? The value of thinking for oneself and appreciating nuances is a good subject, but the handedness was indeed heavy.
Hi, Callie: That’s interesting. Why would that help? I believe Rushdie writes in English (and always has?). I had thought he was a Pakistani of Muslim background, am I wrong? Please elucidate.
“The handedness was indeed heavy”–Very clever wordplay
People who read and speak Hindi much more than English would probably think it seemed really Western. And reflects what they either most hate or most like about American thinking. If anyone agrees with almost everything he says, than it might resonate. Otherwise, no. It seems like this writer has totally gone Western. The poetry in “our language” he seems to refer to is Persian and Urdu love poetry, some if written by Ghalib, whose love poetry is considered comparable to Shakespeare and Milton’s best. But so American to refer to it as poetry. Everything only exists in a general way.
I may not have gotten far enough into the story to observe that, Larry. Thanks. I rarely quit a story but this one I could not take
I can personally say that I enjoyed reading the story a lot, although I’m not very well equipped to defend it. I loved the couple who asked the sage for advice on where to visit, then took the opposite advice, then thanked the sage: “Always! We’re contrary! We ask people what they think and then we do the opposite.”
Does he think that we are so unimaginative that we need blatant metaphors? I felt like I was being patronized with how obvious and lifeless this story was.
Maybe the story’s blatant use of generality and its tilt toward disagreement as very good versus agreement very bad and very old school is a way to to explain why we are the way we we are now, versus the way we were before. I’m thinking he framed the story in an objective versus subjective mode so as not to point fingers or take sides or get overtly political. But the strident quality of this piece takes on a polemic or quasi political tone. I think he might be explaining how in American culture either socially or on social media, how many Americans seem to have become polarized, dismissive or destructive against viewpoints with which they cannot agree with or allow to exist because of their supposed destructiveness or the potential harm they feel these attitudes or points of view can or will cause just by being allowed to exist. Some readers might think this is a good thing and a somewhat creative way to use fictional though somewhat dogmatically didactically infused metaphors to explain a current reality that some like and others dislike. I think it might hit some readers wrong because on the creative spectrum, saying no or disagree or disbelief shuts down all possibilities or brings narrative flow to a halt. And if the no or disagree or disbelief is repeatedly and repetitively asserted, the reader might stop reading. In any conversation, no or disagree or any supposed rejection of the listener or reader stops the conversation or reading or any further progress in the narrative or the story. Some might see this as progressive (as the author seems to) others might see it as degenerative. I agree with DB that this story might seem to unfairly label most readers as unimaginative.
An allegory for the tyranny and Maoism running at unprecedented levels in the US, and widespread online and abroad as well. Rushdie certainly has the bonafides to address the subject and, for the most part, he does it well. There is a salubrious quality to the writing here, the confidence of a writer inhabiting a comfortable space. Rushdie is himself an older citizen, and the fable-like mode has been his milieu for decades. The classicist in him draws on old Europe and Hemingway, bastions of free speech and free expression but also war-torn and contentious. The loggia analogy is on the money and there’s a lovely Chomskyan permutation of making “our language” a personified character, form and aesthetics given flesh, the old man wondering about her, as observers/writer often do, feeling if they’ve earned her glance it may be accidental, a trick of the light.
Artists are as embattled and silenced and persecuted as ever, though, as Soviet-style censorious waves bash at its practitioners in America and elsewhere. In a world where dissent and rebellion are quashed and cancel culture burns down artistic institutions and individuals almost every day, such a tale is a necessary reminder of how far we’ve fallen. These are “subservient, acquiescent days” for sure, and hopefully our artists and writers (and, most of all, our publishers!!!) can muster their courage and set the tongue free once again. The piazza needs to be upkept, it will not fix itself.
For me it reads like a fable. And like any other fable, it is an open-ended narrative, allowing for a unique, ‘reader-specific’ reading. I lost no time in reading it as an Indian story, ( No wonder, if for an American it reads like an American saga ). But let me tell you what really kept me going as I entered the story – it was its minimalist narrative apparatus : (1) its simple language, sounding almost biblical; (2) its non-specific – anywhere, nowhere – location; and (3) its thematic unfolding through a couple of binaries : the binary of “yes/ no” age; and the binary of man/language tension. In this narration, the rise and fall of communication seems to equate with rise and fall of democracy – a political allegory summing up, as if, the prevailing Indian experience.